Reading Material
by Harlequin Sequins
Summary: Goren tries to figure out his fun-sized partner...but falls in love with her instead. One-sided B/A. One-Shot.


AN: You know, I'm really pissed off that they're taking Goren and Eames off of Law and Order. But then again, I think Vincent D'onofrio might be getting bored of doing the same character over and over. Perhaps he wants to stretch his acting chops again...But still, I'm a fan of the show. It's not going to be the same.

Poem is "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron.

**Disclaimer - I don't Alex Eames or Robert Goren.**

* * *

I.

People are so easy to figure out. They fall apart. Their seams tear. And their pale, fragile words are the only string that keeps their tattered guts from falling mouths. People are like books, you open them up and read what's inside, only to be disappointed by what you find or, at the very least, the fire that fueled your desire to unmask the mystery behind a pretty face or an ugly mug…is snuffed out. Easily as a candle in the wind. Because there's nothing to find. Just sand. Pieces. Nothing worth the invested time you wasted just to unveil a boring truth, a manifestation of the boring world around you.

The only person I haven't been able to figure out is _her_. She has many names that I've given her, a way to recognize her name in a more…intimate light. But now, there's so many different titles that I'm never sure which plot I like the best. She's that gritty suspense novel…a tangling mystery…a quiet biography, who only whispers her life secrets to you when she knows you're really listening. But never has she been that quirky romance where everyone knows that, in the end, they'll be a tell-tale couple. A destined pair. They'll find some way to weave themselves together in the end, as familiar and undoubtedly just as annoying as untied shoelaces.

But once they're tied, there's relief.

There's closure.

You can walk again without that nagging fear or irritating doubt of falling flat on your face.

I walk on those untied shoes. I read that uncertain romance novel, the one-sided kind. Thumb through to the end only for the cold, white blank pages because with Eames, there's ambiguity.

And you know, what they say is true. Unrequited love is a force to be reckoned with.

I've tried to sift through her, the same way I sift through an enticing enigma or the dark labyrinths of a twisted mind. Attempted, time and time again, to assign some sort of brilliant diction that would describe her every move and placate the gnawing unrest in me that comes with not knowing. To figure out why it is she draws me in without so much as a word or a blink. Why it leaves me writhing beneath the weight of my own ignorance.

Some things seem to lead me in the right direction, but all I find are locked doors. Boarded windows. Shattered mirrors.

An empty house.

Nowhere. Nothing.

I recognize way her hair falls in her face when she's lost in her own world, her own thoughts, the same ones I just can't reach.

That familiar little…thing she does with her mouth, when it twists and tautens and is pulled in ten different turbulent directions because she's angry with me and I'm being completely unreasonable. I know she can't find just the right vernacular to communicate that anger perfectly enough so that I could understand.

The same look in her eyes when something strikes her hard in the wrong place, but she knows she can't show it, and she secretly crumbles like autumn leaves in an aggressive pair of hands.

But it's all surface value. Circumstantial evidence. The pages that I find when I open her up, to read her intentions and her thought processes and just figure out the essence of _her. _No words. No plot-lines. Nothing tangible. Just the same ambiguity I see in her face when I try to see her.

It's beginning to make me think she's pushing me away, keeping me out of her head because, maybe, behind the infallible shell there's a vulnerability that she conceals from the world. But then, sometimes I catch glimpses of a spark. Of a light that goes on in that empty, boarded window I'm always confronted with when my endeavors to penetrate her line of defenses are calculated, when my movements are too quick to be trusted.

Eames is a conundrum.

Someday I'll figure her out.

* * *

II.

People fall in love so easily. It's fast, it's violent, it can be messy and make even the strongest of men unravel and wane, reduced to their basest form. They grope through the phases of devotion. Bewildered and lost in a love-drunk stupor, but never alone in the fog.

In the force, partners aren't supposed to fraternize outside the job, outside of the cases where's there's only humanity and the reality of emotion that comes with it. Fact is, it's against regulations. Because if you're attached, the misconception was that you don't think straight. Your judgment is clouded and therefore you can't function as a part of the team anymore. All your functionality relies on their presence, their wants and needs, their happiness….everything revolves around them.

There's no part in my narrative where the phrase 'it all started with a day, an hour, a simple happenstance or instance where I realized how short life is'. It was a slow burn. A quiet ignition. Slowly, but surely, her eyes seemed to hold less mystery and more warmth. Her mouth began to seem much too enticing. Those arms became a haven in a matter of long, weary years, a haven I wished I could claim as my own when I realized how deep in her debt I really was. How attached to her I had become.

But I still grieved my lack of insight into her rough, sarcastic demeanor. That restless desire to figure out why it was I loved her so violently, with so much of my being that it made me too weary to think, to move. It wasn't that spontaneous combustion of realization that drew me to her in that exhaustive sort of way.

I was sure that no matter how hard I endeavored to mask my painstaking enthrallment, how I tried to obscure the enraptured heart on my sleeve, that my newfound interest was palpable. I found myself inadvertently closer to her each time she spoke, every time she happened to glance my way and acknowledge I was there beside her. The same habits I used to manipulate a confession out of an obstinate suspect I used on her…like I expected some sort of reaction to my obvious signs of interest.

She didn't seem to notice.

* * *

III.

This time, there was an instance in which a moment could be defined by action. By certain threads of words and looks and insinuations that came together to form one motley picture, a patchwork of intrigue that lured me back into her snare. I'd tried to forget for a while. Because Robert Goren doesn't just let one lone woman and her unintended conquest of my attention distract him from his work.

But _Bobby_ does.

Today was different. She was too beautiful to ignore, with that certain glow about her that only a good night's sleep and a strong cup of coffee could provide. Her eyes were dark and her skin pale, just as darkly dream-like as the memory I kept of her in the doldrums of rumination.

Always the same, but never boring.

I cradled my chin in the palm of my hand, looking her over as my head tilted faintly to the side. "Did you know that _women_ blink nearly twice as much as men?"

She looked at me once before contributing a somewhat aloof, cagey smile to our newly established conversation. "Considering most of your useless, post-case trivia is about as arbitrary as you are, I'm not surprised…"

"Surprised about the trivia or the fact that I'm arbitrary?"

"I'm never surprised about your unpredictability."

My body curved. Inclined as I tried to detect my way in. If it was even the smallest amount of space that I could find, I'd take what I could get. "Don't you ever wonder why it is that most women use their eyes as an instrument of seduction?"

"No," she sighed. "But I'm sure you're intent on telling me."

"A woman's most powerful tool is her eyes. Good looks fade. Legs can…become unsightly. Breasts are a matter of preference…but the eyes are the window to the soul. They never change, they can never be altered…it is the essence of who they are. And women, being honest creatures of habit, want the object of their attention to know just who they are."

She seemed mildly impressed, her brow arching to the slightest degree. "And here I thought that eyes were just for seeing…"

* * *

IV.

Most days I wanted to break down and tell her. That I burned for her. That I ached for her. That she was the last thought that hung on my mind when I buried my face into a pillow and chased futile dreams.

But considering how estranged Alex Eames was from the fairytale world of whirlwind romance and the soft-spoken, nervous confessions that came with the territory, I couldn't see my offer being so gracefully accepted as it was in my fantasies. And so I kept to myself, strayed in the shadows and watched as, day by day, Alex's halo shed a little more light to spare for me.

I buried myself in poetry when the case work was low. With Rostand and Shakespeare and Byron and Keats, all masters of rhyme and reason. One caught my eye the most ferociously, that called her image to recollection with such vivid accuracy that I couldn't put it from my mind. Not for a day. Not for an hour.

She brought my coffee at some time in the morning, when I'd forgotten to look at the clock and was sitting in the passenger's seat of her car. Her fingers brushed mine as she handed off the warm cup to me and, like a catalyst, the poem in question was recalled. Without thinking, I recited the stanza.

"She walks in beauty, like the night. Of cloudless climes and starry skies. And all that's best of dark and bright. Meet in her aspect and her eyes. Thus mellow'd to that tender light. Which heaven to gaudy day denies."

Alex was, like she'd said before, never surprised by the suddenness of my thought patterns sometimes. She always just wrote it off as a quirk, a personality trait that she'd just have to come to terms with or be driven crazy by for the rest of her time with me. But that look on her face, when I turned to her and saw that I had commanded her focus, seemed utterly lost. She'd not been expecting it.

"Lord Byron…_She Walks in Beauty._"

I expected a fanfare. But received, in its stead, a drawn out sort of silence that seemed to have no end.

And not even a sarcastic remark in sight.

* * *

IV.

It took me a long time to configure Alex's precarious angles. The reason why she was a vague outline of a story yet to be discovered.

I spent all my time trying to decode her secret ways, as if they'd unlock some unfathomable mystery of the ages. She was no Helen of Troy, not Hector's Andromache. There was not a hint of Catherine Earnshaw in her, not even in her darkest of moments. Elizabeth Bennett seemed a close match, but still lacked the quality that seemed only Alex Eames.

But that was just Alex…simply unsolved. It was what made her so good at what she did. Why her companionship never grew old and withered, stale in the hands of time. Why I considered myself fortunate.

Because despite the frustration, the need for closure, sometimes the best endings were left to the imagination.

* * *

.FIN.


End file.
